She’s written hits for Lizzo and Rita Ora, plus a string of her own. Next up: an album she wrote with fans while on lockdown in LA

Nineteen years post-Pop Idol, there is not much left to demystify about the way pop music is made. Fans follow the industry’s movements as obsessively as football supporters do the Premier League; songwriters and producers have their own followings. There are podcasts where artists explain a song’s path from genesis to completion. And yet, watching Charli XCX handwrite lyrics live on Instagram over the past few weeks, straight from her brain to her notebook to thousands of viewers, felt like a borderline masochistic degree of exposure – the equivalent of me livestreaming my way through every sentence of this piece. I’d rather walk down the street naked.

On 6 April, XCX – 27-year-old Cambridge-born Charlotte Aitchison – announced she was making an entire album, How I’m Feeling Now, while in lockdown at home in Los Angeles. She would share every step: lyric-writing and video-shooting; progress-stalling allergic reactions; tearful late-night Instagram confessions that she thinks she expects too much of her collaborators (later deleted). Fans were given carte blanche to give feedback and contribute visuals. “Sometimes it’s nerve-racking,” she says, when I ask if this amount of openness makes her feel vulnerable. “Other times bad comments will sway me, but I need to roll with the punches. If people don’t like it, it’s OK. The idea is to have some kind of interesting tension, to make the music feel different, and representative of the time that we’re in.”